Depending on technical knowledge, it is easier and cheaper in the long run to set up a NAS system. Run RAID 5 for maximum space plus backup, and you have paid it off within a year at most conventional rates. The only real benefits I see to cloud storage are ease of access anywhere, and maintenance (kind of like renting/owning). You have less control over it, but you also can have someone else fix it if it goes wrong.

However, the one thing you need to think about with 250GB - 1TB is amount of time to upload. Most internet providers give you fast downloads but slow uploads, meaning it can take months to upload your initial archive and days everytime you add a new few GB worth of photos (unless you live in Kansas and have access to Google Fiber).

This stuff really depends on your needs. Cloud storage / hosted storage has a lot of advantages over the suggested NAS solutions like multi-location backups, i.e. if your house is broken into, or burns down, your NAS is stolen too or is burn to a crisp too. If your NAS breaks down (which is actually common, the controller, not the drives) you're also in a bit of a pickel to fix it.

The prices of cloud storage is only reasonable for small quantities. I'm using googledrive for $5/year I get 31gb (yupp that's per year! ). Looking at their plans I see that 200gb is $10/month which is barely reasonable, and going up to your 1tb it's fairly unreasonable at $50/month.

I don't think any online storage is "affordable" at the quanities you're talking about. Maybe you should evaluate if you really need that quantity of online storage. Online storage is really redundant and fail safe, perhaps not all 1tb of data has such high requirements? (even though I use my 31gb of online storage, I also bought a 1tb usb drive for $80 for less important things).

My only other note is... to keep in mind that many of these online storage systems claim rights to anything you upload. They say they are allowed to use and or reporoduce anything you upload even after you delete them and often with out notification or permission. For me, I only upload fully encrypted files... trust no one

That's a good deal though, if the majority of his files are photos, then take the free google drive 5gb for the data files, and use the flicker for unlimited photos. Even if he upgraded google drive to 25gb for the data files, that's only $2.50/month + flickers $1.87/month is only ... $4.37/month, he's still got $0.43 left to splurge on something!

I should also note, I'd trust large vendors like amazon storage, google drive, flicker / yahoo, but the smaller third party companies... well I think one went under just last year and everyone lost all their online files.

I have been using Backblaze for a while now and have had no issues with it, though I have yet to need to recover files using the service. At the time I started using it, it was one of only few (it may have been the only one, actually) that let me backup files on my external drives at the similar price point. I have well over 1TB on it and have had no issues with upload time, though it helps that my ISP have consistently delivered promised/advertised upload speed.

I use XnYnZ.com to store my files and photos.I feel secured and have no problem in uploading my files there.I suggest them for you. Their service starts with $2.50 /month for 100GB and if you require additional storage space, you may purchase it in incremental packs from them.

I use Amazon Glacier. It's dirt cheap ($.01/gb), as it is intended to be a true backup. You get charged more when you retrieve files ($.12/gb past the first free gb). I've used it for about a year and literally payed $.87 a month to Amazon to have an offsite backup. I added my pics in January and it went up to $1.03.

I do also backup everything on my laptops to my Synology NAS which does so wirelessly and automatically. This backs itself up too to another harddrive, but upon reflection, I could probably drop that since adding Amazon Glacier.

I use Backblaze for my whole OS and Arq for OSX ($29 once, plus cost of Amazon S3/Glacier usage) (Cloudberry for Windows does the same thing) for my crucial stuff. I use Dropbox (free account) more to sync files between machines than as a backup.

Carbonite is a good option like Backblaze. Carbonite allows you to encrypt with your own key (good for security-minded folk) and Backblaze has restore options where they'll ship you your data on a drive, because who wants to wait for 3TB to download, not to mention the extra fees your ISP would charge you.

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